This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Welcome to a brand new week, episode 744. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. Wow, I've got a great story for you today. Can't wait to bring it to you.
Just want to do a really quick follow-up on yesterday's recap, where I talked about the government shutdown. I just want to reiterate once more, I was thinking about this a bit more after we recorded the episode. You know, if you're out there and you're a US federal worker not getting your paycheck, first and foremost, I empathize. I think it sucks and I hope the government reopens soon. I really do. And second, once you're out of that situation, out of the immediate crisis,
and really not just for those people, but for anyone else out there, to me, it just kind of illustrates the fact that you need more than one source of income. I mean, that's the whole mantra, mission, vision of Side Hustle School. You need to create an income for yourself, even if you are happy in your job, even if you're happy working for the government or an organization. You need to do something to look out for yourself because nobody else is going to look out for you the way that you can. So that said, most important, our thoughts are with you. Anybody out there who's struggling or has a family member who's
struggling because of this situation. Okay. So for today's episode, we're going to look at a nonstop musical card that just keeps going for hours and hours with no off switch. Is it a gift for your friend or is it a gift for you? Well, whatever it is, it's insanely profitable. No joke, this prank musical greeting card
and related products earns $36,000 a month for the guy who started it. So pretty huge there, multiple six figure and nonstop success nonstop, you know, because the card doesn't stop. But hey, I'll explain that in a moment. Here's a shout out to our sponsor. And then that story.
Travis Peterson didn't have a childhood aspiration to make a nonstop musical greeting card that looped for up to six hours. He didn't study the greeting card industry in college, he studied finance. And then he didn't hate his job and investment banking. He liked it just fine. But life is funny. These days, Travis spends much of his time managing a little project that sells close
to half a million dollars a year, all built around what was admittedly a silly idea. The silly idea came about when Travis and his brother Nick were visiting a relative who had received a musical greeting card. You know, one of those cards that plays a little annoying tune when you open it up. Travis said, this is really dumb. And Nick said, right, but what if it didn't stop? In other words,
what if the music just kept playing no matter what you did? That was the extent of the idea validation process. There weren't any focus groups, prototypes or market research. Their goal was to make $1,000 in profit from a prank musical greeting card that looped nonstop when opened. You couldn't turn it off unless you destroyed the card. Their thought was if musical greeting cards
were annoying, theirs would be the most annoying of all. Well, their Kickstarter project for the card raised a bit more than $1,000. In fact, it raised more than $90,000. And once that happened, Travis decided to give it more of his attention. Through LinkedIn, they found a manufacturer in China and got 1000 cards made. Boosted by that crowdfunding momentum, they began direct sales at
the same time they began to reach out to vendors and retailers hoping to be stocked in stores. Because after all, most people buy greeting cards in person. That second part took a while, but once some stores began to sell them, their competitors noticed Joker greeting. That was the name they had chosen, by the way Joker greeting competitors noticed and soon they had requests coming in. Travis says Keep in mind stores and retailers are always looking for new ideas that have strong sell through because every product on their shelf goes stale at some point. The idea kept building and
building. Among other tactics they tried. They included glitter that would explode whenever you ripped up the card, thus adding another set to the prank. They made a video of the card being dunked in water. It still worked. And this one is my favorite. Travis made and uploaded another video.
This one eight hours long of the card being played nonstop. We put that on YouTube. That video has something like 100,000 views now, which says a lot about how people spend their time on the internet. Now this is a pretty amazing success. I mean, incredible, the number of cards they've sold.
We'll get into that more in a moment. But they've also had challenges like I often talk about. And some of the problems haven't been a laughing matter. Problem number one was cash flow. When it comes to the retail side of the business, Travis has to make some detailed projections about how much stock to purchase. And this can be hard because, like right now, for example,
there are some prime greeting card holidays coming up with Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Father's Day around the corner. He has to decide whether to buy all of his stock now, or buy it a little at a time and have excess funds to fall back on in the event of something going wrong. More on what could go wrong in just a second. But the short version is there are all sorts of cost variables he has to keep in mind when making large purchases. Okay, so speaking of something going really wrong, problem number two was bad inventory. Two years ago, disaster struck.
He had roughly 10,000 units in his back stock that ended up going back. The batteries were duds. He had disgruntled vendors coming back to him because their customers were complaining that the cards would last for five minutes and then die out. On the Joker greeting website, Travis stated that his cards would last at least three hours. So he had created the standard he had to live up to. And when they weren't lasting as long as he had promised, people were upset.
This led him to a big discovery. The discovery was the shelf life of these cards was two to three months. After that, the batteries would quickly lose their power. One of his vendors had put in a $20,000 order from this batch of cards. It took Travis a year and a half to gain the trust of that vendor again. And it taught him an important lesson about managing inventory.
Now, needless to say, that problem was definitely in the disaster category. His profit suffered, he lost those 10,000 units of product. And it was at that moment that he had to decide whether to throw in the towel or keep going. After some deliberation, he considered both options, but he did decide to move forward, give it four months and see what happened. It's now two years later and Joker greeting has rebounded from the catastrophe and leaps and bounds. Now we asked Travis if he had any advice for us. And he said he's not a big fan of rules of
thumb because he thinks that there are no two businesses that are exactly alike. However, he does have some guidance. He follows the Michael Scott kiss line of thinking, keep it simple, stupid, start with something simple and see if the product is even something that people are going to purchase. Get that proof of concept in place before you make any big investments or decisions. So for example, he and his brother are starting a new greeting card company called Bloom Greetings. And he's taking his own advice. These cards are not joke related. It's a totally
different concept altogether. And they started it with just $500. So even though they could spend a lot more money on it, they're choosing not to, they want to make sure it's going to work first. That prank musical greeting card that wouldn't stop playing an annoying tune has certainly worked. In 2017, they sold nearly 40,000 of them. And Travis says they could have actually sold more,
but each holiday they found themselves sold out. They kept ordering and then selling through. And in 2018, they sold 50,000 units and began visiting trade shows. This was all done on startup costs of about $2,000 later covered by Kickstarter pledges. And it now brings in around $36,000 per month. With a new line of non-prank cards coming out and a strong relationship with vendors they
built up, it's no joke. This whimsical idea just won't stop. Well, as I said, pretty awesome story, at least I thought so. And apparently nobody has ever done this before. Nobody has made this kind of nonstop musical loop greeting card. And even if you destroy the card, then glitter goes everywhere.
And Travis pointed out when we talked with him that his business is hard to copy. And not necessarily the technology itself, because presumably somebody else could go and hire some other manufacturer in China to make the same thing. But he has this dominance in SEO. Now, if you search prank greeting card, Joker greeting is going to turn up because they've had a lot of media coverage. And you know, we're calling this episode something about a prank greeting card. So
all of this just kind of reinforces his authority and influence there. Also, even though it was originally a pretty silly idea, the way he's been able to create long term business value from it is through the execution of the idea. So it's not easy to build those relationships with vendors and make decisions about how many tens of thousands of cards to order. And then when disaster strikes, like that crazy experience of the batteries being duds, it's not a simple thing at all to figure out how to respond and recover. So that to me is where the value is that is just as interesting as coming up with the initial idea. So if you hear this story, and you think, Oh, that's pretty cool.
But you know, the whole trick was in the idea. I think the whole trick is in the execution of the idea. So with that in mind, I'll be curious to see what happens with his new expansion. All right, that's it for today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.
If you want to find the show notes for today's episode, learn more about Joker greeting, check out their website, just come to sidehustleschool.com/744. Much more is on the way, including a brand new episode tomorrow morning. Be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
